Building a Business that Supports Biodiversity

My father was ahead of his time, a farmer focused on conservation back in the ’70s. There was a lot of over-clearing happening in western Victoria at that time—salinity and erosion had become a problem. And he had us out planting trees along the creek lines and in the gullies to stop the erosion. That’s where my passion for conservation started. Then he took a second job with the Soil Conservation Authority, a lead environmental government agency at the time, and that’s when we began doing farm conservation projects.

When we got older Dad would say to us, “Go get a professional career. Don’t do conservation,” don’t do farming basically. It’s all too hard. But I wanted to be a farmer, so one of his mates said to me, “You could be a valuer. You could have a valuer’s income and live in the country and eventually buy yourself a farm.” Which appealed to me. I went to university in Melbourne and did a property valuations course, got a cadetship with the valuer general’s office and became a rural land valuer. Then I started my own business and set up an industrial portfolio of assets for a client which I listed on the ASX, and it got taken over by Stockland in the early 2000s.

All of this eventually led me to purchase Mt Rothwell, which is where I could finally be on the land and do conservation work. For many years, friends and I had talked about threatened species and wondered why certain animals were no longer in areas where we’d grown up. At Mt Rothwell I could start paying attention to ecosystems and understand how they could be recovered. The deeper we got into the work, the more we realised the broader impact we were having beyond rebuilding these threatened species populations. We realised we were also playing a role in creating a community of passionate conservations, we were responding to climate change, building a distinct work culture and raising capital. Now, on each farm we work with, there are seven Cs we seek to address.

Creatures

Our ultimate goal with creatures is to protect and recover. We really want to breed up the numbers of endangered animals on our farms so that they get to sustainable populations. For each farm, we choose a threatened species to be the focus. It doesn’t mean it’s the only species we focus on, but it means we build the ecosystem around that species.

The first animal we worked with at Mt Rothwell was the eastern barred bandicoot, which was thought to be extinct in Victoria. About 10 kilometres from where I grew up, a small population was found in a tip and put into a captive breeding program with Zoos Victoria. The role we played was to breed them in a fox-free space on the land rather than in captive pens. Since then we’ve put back eastern barred bandicoots, southern brown bandicoots, rufous bettongs, eastern quolls. We’re re-building the hierarchy of mammals.

It’s amazing to see these animals assume their roles in the ecosystem. We noticed the bettongs would dig the soil and the bandicoots would carry seeds on their noses and stick their noses into the soil and be the seeders. A massive number of birds of prey have returned to the area. Bird life’s multiplied. And the more the animals work, the more native grasses proliferate. We’ve had a couple of plants come back that we didn’t think would have been there, like the spiny rice flower. So creatures is really the starting point for building up these ecosystems.

Climate

Climate is comprehensive, and perhaps the most important. One of the greatest things we can do is sequester a lot of carbon into the soil. To a degree we make sure we’re not an emitter of carbon either. In our work we measure our soil carbon so that we can demonstrate to people how much the soil can take, and now we’re selling carbon credits on one of the farms for the first time. It’s also important that we’re reducing waste. We are connected to an orchard farm where there’s a big deal of waste, and that’s bad for methane. So we’ve created a system where we can reuse as much of the offshoots as we can. We also take green waste from Melbourne to our farms and turn it into compost, which brings life back to the soil and means we again sequester carbon.

Corridors

Corridors is about connecting two or more larger areas of similar wildlife habitat. I’ve got two approaches. One is a landscape corridor, so it might be a forest like the Brisbane Ranges and Werribee State Gorge where there’s a beautiful forest, then farm land, then another beautiful forest. And you plant trees and other native vegetation to enable migration and colonisation of plants and land animals. The other is where you create a series of wetlands which birds and bats can move between. So the corridor doesn’t have to physically connect land for flying animals like it does mammals. We would look at a piece of land and say, “Is it a wetland? What other linkages are there? Or is it in a physical landscape corridor?” Ideally, each of our projects is in a bigger corridor.

Then we go micro and look at how corridors work on a farm. You ask questions like, “Are they following drainage lines or are a creek? Are we rejoining a couple of bits of remnant vegetation with a planting linkage?” We have a farm that fronts the Lodden River and by doing the planting correctly along the drainage lines, we can improve the river health. We get terrestrial carbon back into the river which is good for the fish, and that flows into the whole river system corridor.

Community

Community’s really fascinating because it happened organically; it’s not something we set out to achieve at the beginning. It started up at Mount Rothwell when I found people keen to come and volunteer with us and work. I was blown away by the amount of help people were willing to give and the joy we were all getting as a group. That’s where I started seeing a community emerge from the objective of rebuilding ecology and ecosystems.

Now we have students come to do studies on our farms. We’ve done programs with Corrections Victoria where they bring offenders who are incarcerated to work on the land. Then there are people who are just fascinated by nature and want to come and do a night walk and learn more about the different animals. Each time we get involved with a threatened species there’s a recovery team, and that’s usually made up of people who are just passionate about that species. So there’s a community that builds around the recovery of every species we’re involved in.

Culture

Culture is about how we work together as an organisation. It’s how we share information and practices across all the projects we work on, and how we stay aligned on mission. Then in a bigger sense, it’s how we work with our First Australians because they have so much knowledge about the land and land management. A lot of this has evolved through instinct—being able to hear what you feel—and experiential learning. Each time we do something we’ll keep an open mind about what can happen on that farm, and listening to instinct allows us to make the best decisions for where we’re at. It also means we attract people whose instinct is to recognise something or someone else that is authentic. That’s why we’ve got such wonderful people around us.

Cashflow and capital

It’s critical that we have financial returns on our farms—that as well as having this incredible social and environmental impact, we are also making money. We want to demonstrate, particularly to our investors, that impact investing can support biodiversity solutions. Tiverton is one of our assets where there is an operating sheep farm along with many other regenerative practices taking place. We had a really interesting situation with our wool there. We’d been raising the sheep on these native grasses, and the quality of the wool was really fantastic. We started getting fantastic prices for it. Recently we had our wool sales and it was the first time an apparel buyer wanted to buy our wool because of the quality as well as the conservation story. So we will have branded wool that incorporates these incredible conservation stories. Eventually we’ll be selling direct to companies that are demanding the quality and the impact story.

Odonata is a non-profit organisation that supports biodiversity solutions on farms across Australia. Founded by Nigel Sharp, a biodiversity impact investor with a long-term passion for conservation, Odonata uses business as a tool for regenerating ecosystems and growing the populations of endangered species.

Within its portfolio is Mount Rothwell, a 420-hectare property which has managed the conservation of some of Australia’s most threatened fauna species, including the Eastern Barred Bandicoot and Eastern Quoll. The team works with farmers, investors and researchers on eight farms across Australia, regenerating degraded landscapes and building community in the process.